Tag: App of the Week
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Fantastical is a calendaring app for the Mac that makes entering appointments quick and easy. The idea behind Fantastical is that you can enter your appointments using natural language. Open up the entry dialog via either the toolbar or a key combination, and just type naturally. Fantastical takes care of the rest. For example, if you type “Meet with Joe at the office on Thursday at noon,” Fantastical will plug all of the appointment details into the correct slot in a calendar entry, using a slick user interface.

Every now and then, a third party developer comes up with an app that provides functionality that should have been baked into an operating system to begin with. Yoink is one such app. If you’re like me when I use my MacBook Air, you might place each app into its own desktop, and use the trackpad to swipe back and forth between them. This can make it tricky, though, to drag files or images between apps. Yoink makes it easy.

If you come from the Windows world, uninstalling apps on a Mac might seem a bit odd to you. Unlike in Windows, where you go through a whole uninstall process, on a Mac there are no such hoops to jump through. To uninstall a Mac app, you simply highlight it in your application folder, and trash it. The problem, though, is that many Mac apps leave behind preference files and other breadcrumbs, even after you delete them. To remove all traces of an app from your Mac, delete it using AppCleaner.

When it comes to buying apps, trust the hive mind. I should have learned that bit of wisdom long ago, but at times I need to learn from my own mistakes. My selection of a blogging editor was one mistake, where I could have just listened to the wisdom that I saw espoused all over the Internet. My selection of a Google Reader app for my Android phone was another. Shortly after getting my phone, I tried out the official Google Reader app, then dropped money on another app that I’ve long since forgotten. Finally, I surrendered and tried out NewsRob, the app that received everyone’s praises. I’ve been using it ever since.

As most of you will probably agree, 40 isn’t so old. In fact, nowadays 40 isn’t too old to raise a newborn. That’s what is going on in my household right now, as we raise a baby that is just a couple of weeks old. When Baby 40Tech was born, my wife and I knew that it was important to keep track of the baby’s feedings, diapers, and more. Naturally, I looked to tech for help with that. Read more

In our previous looks at Markdown, we focused on a couple of free apps (one Windows, one Mac) that have native Markdown support. If you have a favorite text editor, though, and want to bring Markdown to it, then check out Marked. (For a discussion about why you should care about Markdown, head on over to our post about why you should bother with Markdown).

This week’s app of the week post is a mea culpa of sorts, instead of a full review. Several months ago, we compared MarsEdit, ecto, and Blogo, which are all Mac blogging apps. Head on over to that review for a more detailed look at MarsEdit, and the other two apps. At the time, I favored ecto, largely because of the way that it handled images. Since then, I’ve seen the light. I’ve purchased a MarsEdit license, and haven’t looked back.

Talented photographs and photo editors abound. I’m not one of them. I use my trusty point and shoot, and every now and then I can impress myself with a lucky shot. I also can’t work the Photoshop magic that some professionals can weave every day. If I want to tweak an image, I need a simple tool. “Simple” is a word that describes iSplash, a Mac photo app that is a one-trick pony. That trick, though, is pretty cool.

I have a confession to make. If I follow you on Twitter, there’s a good chance that I don’t see any of your tweets. Twitter got so busy for me, that the only way that I could manage it, was to sort people into lists. I have several lists, but I have one super-special list for the tweets of users that I don’t want to miss. When I’m busy, that’s the only part of Twitter that I ever see. When I try out Twitter apps, therefore, list support is the first thing I check out. That’s why I use Plume . . . but I’m open to suggestions for an app that handles lists even better. If you know of one, let us know in the comments.

8/20/11 UPDATE: Just a few days after this post went live, the developer of MenuWeather Lite announced that MenuWeather Lite would be discontinued. His web site indicates that it will remain in the App Store for a month or two, but I can no longer find it in the App Store. The paid version, now $1,99, is still there.

If you want to be able to quickly check the weather on a Mac, check out MenuWeather Lite. The app places an icon in your menu bar that displays the temperature and general conditions, such as cloudy or sunny, at a predetermined location. Click on the icon, and a dropdown list appears, showing you more detailed current conditions, and a five day forecast. The drop down also contains a link to a 10 day forecast, hour by hour forecast, radar map, and weekend and monthly forecasts.